The Loved and the Lost Page 12

  If he himself followed her into those dives where she stirred up jealousy, suspicion, lust, and old racial hatreds, he might find himself involved. If he went on, he would be letting his curiosity get the better of his common sense; he would be forgetting that he had come to Montreal to take a job at The Sun, and if he got himself involved in a scandal Mr. Carver certainly couldn’t afford to take him on. The job on The Sun was the kind of job he had always dreamed of. He had come to it after many years of waiting since the night on the Havelock beach when he had run along the road and then had stopped and looked back at the hedge, muttering, “Just wait!” That night, the end of his boyhood, he had lain awake for hours dreaming of making a name for himself some day so no one would ever have to ask again who he was. He had waited and had suffered many humiliations but had known the day would come when his talents would be recognized. Now the main chance had come. He could get his own column in The Sun; he would be read; he would go on from there to a bigger world. It was time, then, to realize what was expedient and what was inexpedient. It certainly would be unwise to see Peggy again.

  Vowing he would put the girl and the café out of his mind completely, he got into bed. He fell asleep concentrating on a picture of himself and Catherine at the Ritz Sunday supper and at Angela Murdock’s party, and in the bright picture he saw himself, free from unwanted distractions, showing Catherine how much he appreciated what she could offer him.

  FOURTEEN

  Sitting in the Ritz lounge with Catherine, who was so attractive in her pale green dress with the Mexican earrings and silver bracelets, he tried to find in her fresh glowing face the promise of all he wanted in a woman. Her tone, her style, her sympathy were just right for him. She showed her approval in her slow happy smile. She offered him not only an intensification of all those pleasures he had ever enjoyed in the company of a pretty woman, but something more, which he felt especially when their conversation trailed off and there were silences; it was a reminder that he had within his grasp not only all the familiar delightful emotions that could come from a woman in love but the success he had sought since his boyhood. How could he have let anyone get in the way and blind him to her attractiveness? he asked himself. By concentrating on all Catherine offered, he believed he could keep Peggy out of his thoughts. He joked and laughed, he confused and charmed Catherine. He gossiped with her about the guests entering through the swinging street doors, making it clear they were the kind of people in Montreal who interested him. They came in with snow on their shoulders and fur hats and headed for the big table in the dining room that was set up like a Swedish smörgasbord. The French, unlike the English, came in family groups; but, French or English, those who looked most prosperous and distinguished bowed to Catherine.

  Then Claude, the headwaiter, with the manner of an emperor looking after his own people, glanced at his reservation list, beckoned to McAlpine and Catherine, checked off the name, and announced, “Yes, indeed, Mr. McAlpine,” and they joined the line moving around the long table. There were hot roasts, cold cuts, turkey, chicken, ducks, salads, hot meats in steaming silver bowls, mushrooms, and pastries and sweets. If the hand of one guest touched the hand of another, both reaching for a last napoleon, both hands were withdrawn deferentially and the watchful waiter whispered, “I will bring more at once.”

  But McAlpine drank too much wine, he ate too heartily, he laughed too boisterously, his face flushed. “I suppose most of Angela’s friends are also your father’s friends,” he said.

  “Oh, my goodness, no, Jim! Daddy doesn’t take some of Angela’s enthusiasms very seriously. But everybody will be there. Maybe your friend Ernest Havelock will be there.” And then she noticed that he was not really listening; his eyes now were melancholy, and he was slowly rubbing his left cheek with his fingers. “Jim? Where are you? What’s the matter?”

  “Why, nothing at all, Catherine.”

  “But you didn’t hear a word I said.”

  “Why, I could repeat every word of it.”

  “What’s on your mind, Jim?”

  “Nothing. Nothing at all. What makes you think there is?”

  “You always seem so sure of yourself, yet now – well, one minute you seem close to me – with me – happy, and I love it, Jim. We seem to be soaring along. But the next moment you’re worried.”

  “Me worried?” he asked, looking astonished. “I suppose I’m full of wine and brandy and lighthearted.” His hand reaching out for the salt brushed against hers, and he doggedly dwelt on her long fingers; in the silent moment he looked up at her hair line; his eyes met her candid blue eyes, and he nodded in recognition of each attractive part of her.

  “Sometimes I don’t seem to know you, Jim,” she said shyly. “I don’t know what goes on in you. Maybe there’s a side to your nature I don’t understand. At first I didn’t think so. I felt I knew you about as well as you knew yourself. I thought I knew what you wanted, and we seemed to want the same things. I mean all the way down the line.”

  “We do, we do,” he said. “We don’t open up enough to each other, Catherine, that’s all. It’s my fault. I don’t want it to be that way. Come on, let’s move. It may be hard to get a taxi.”

  In the crowded lobby while Catherine was getting her snow boots from the checkroom, McAlpine looked for a taxi. When she joined him at the door they smiled at each other; they both felt they were at a point where their lives could change, and she reached for his hand.

  “What’s the matter with that doorman?” she asked. “Here I thought he was getting us a taxi. Look how he’s playing favourites.” Then she laughed. “Let’s forget him. It’s only a few blocks away. I’m in an Alpine mood. I like climbing in the snow. Come on, Jim.”

  They went out and crossed the street and began to climb tree-lined Drummond with its old houses, and he held on tightly to her arm. Snow banks lined the slippery sidewalk, the slope got steeper, and they had to go more slowly. At the top of the street they came to the high steps which were like a dark web against the snow; and, holding on to the railing and laughing and lurching when they slipped against each other, they went up the steps, resting awhile on the platforms, breathing hard, then going on to the top where they sat close together to rest and look down over the city.

  All round were bare, snow-laden branches of trees, and the wind sighing through them blew clots of snow on their shoulders. The exertion of the climb had warmed them, and they felt exhilarated. Rows of bare trees below them dipped down the slope in a fantastic netting strung across the glowing street lights, and the roofs of the houses were blanketed with snow. The street lights threw a brilliant winter glow over the whole white sloping city. The sounds of autos on Pine Street above and the streetcars and the jingle of sleigh bells below broke the sigh of the cold wind. Linking their arms tight, they swung their knees together for warmth; they were still breathing hard, and it was this catch in their breathing and the thumping of their hearts that gave everything Catherine said a broken eagerness.

  “I don’t very often go to these parties of Angela’s,” she said. “You see, they are mainly Daddy’s friends. They’re the kind of influential and intellectual people who would have bored me to tears a year ago when I wasn’t interested in anything. I had no mind then, I mean.” She laughed with a puzzling excitement. “Daddy always said I had a good mind but I never used it. I liked all my friends to be amusing, and we just played around. What happened in the world didn’t matter, as long as we all had some money. In those days I would have laughed at the women at Angela’s place all standing around by themselves. Nice busy women, but all drabs, really. I still don’t like the women, those energetic wifely women, Jim.” As she caught her breath he wondered why he was moved. “But going along with you, Jim, knowing it’s important to you – well, it’s different. It becomes fun. I want to be bright and intelligent so we’ll both make a good impression.” Her tone changed, her rapid and incoherent talk ended in a soft laugh. For the first time she felt that he could be content
in being always with her.

  He felt her happiness, and it soothed and charmed him. What a fool he had been, he told himself, not to see that he could be more truly and freely himself with her than with any girl he had ever met! He groped for her hand, wanting and yet not daring to tell her that she had been in his thoughts all week, warning him not to spoil his life. “Everything changes a little, then looks right when you’re with someone who – well, when you know someone seems to be keeping in step with you,” he said. “Someone helping you go the way you’ve always wanted to go. Nobody can count on meeting anyone who seems to have been with him from the beginning, Catherine,” he said, wondering if she would remember how he had stood outside the Havelocks’ dark hedge years ago, feeling the power of his own will. He didn’t have to explain it to her; she felt it herself; it added to his own fine awareness that she fitted perfectly into his ambitious plans. More than that; with her own life she could carry him forward lightly and effortlessly in the direction he had mapped out for himself; she beckoned and prodded him along with an enchanting ease.

  “I think I was a lonely kid,” he went on. “That’s why I don’t open up, Catherine. I think I’ve always been hiding something of myself, waiting until the one I could be sure of would come along.”

  “I know,” she said gently.

  Their silence only bolstered his sensible conviction that everything could go smoothly for them, and he looked down over the snow-laden roofs to the streets, ghostly in the pallid gleam of the lights reflected in the sky. If he hadn’t come to his senses, he told himself, he might be down there now in some dingy little quarter by the railroad tracks or in a bare room in some side street, worrying irrationally about Peggy and exhausting himself in violent protests against his own wrongheadedness in trying to cope with her difficult nature; and, even while protesting, he would be foolish enough to let her go on complicating everything for him with the mysterious disorder of her life. He had let her knock him off balance – not in the head, no, never in the head, but by touching something in his nature like a hidden shameful wild recklessness. She could destroy his self-control; she could heap on him jarring fragments of a strange chaotic experience. To be with her would be to be jarred always, to be hurt strangely in the heart whenever he tried to be sensibly disciplined. All so difficult, so difficult and mystifying, he protested within himself, starring down at the white city where Peggy still called to him, trying to compel him to follow and understand the quick darting changes in her life; to follow till he caught the disturbing glow of a poetry in it he could never understand, alien as it was to his nature and shattering to his soul. Even to think of her now was so difficult and so upsetting that he turned to Catherine, seeking the tranquillity and peace he found in her presence.

  A gust of wind blew a snow pad from the branches overhead, and it plopped down on Catherine’s neck. Jumping up, she squealed, “Ouch, it’s cold! Oh, Jim, my poor neck!” Drawing off his gloves he tried to scrape the snow from her warm skin before it melted.

  “Well, that’s enough of that,” she said, laughing. “Come on, Jim.”

  The Murdock house, only a little way east along Pine, was a vast square brick house with an iron fence on the street, and many trees at the back of the house, all perched on the rim of the mountain. Cars were parked along Pine in front of the great lighted house that had been built by Judge Murdock’s father, a lumber merchant who had made a fortune. In the old days the Murdocks had entertained only their merchant friends; but when Judge Murdock, at the age of sixty-five, had married Angela the house had become a brightly lit place with the doors always open.

  The party had overflowed into the big panelled hall, where Angela Murdock waited at the drawing-room door. A tall, warmly plump, auburn-haired woman of forty with lovely shoulders, a slender waist, milky skin, and graceful movements, she had a warm, tolerant word for everyone.

  “Ah, Catherine, you and Commander McAlpine,” she said gaily. Not for months had anyone called McAlpine “Commander,” and he liked it. “I was talking to Catherine’s father about you, Commander,” she whispered. “Or rather he was talking to me about you. My, you’ve made an impression!” And she led him across the crowded drawing room to the corner where her husband, the Judge, sat contentedly by himself. For two hours he would sit there and then retire unobtrusively to his own room so he would feel fresh and keen-minded when he took his place on the bench in the morning.

  The diningroom buffet was loaded with the choicest whiskies and brandies. Catherine took a small brandy, and McAlpine a stiff Canadian Club. Why he poured himself such a stiff drink and felt he needed it, he didn’t stop to figure out. The drink had a peculiar effect on him. Of course he had drunk too much wine at the Ritz anyway, and had just come in out of the cold air, but as he glanced around, none of the blurring faces looked attractive; yet they were the faces of important people who could be valuable to him. He caught snatches of familiar conversation.

  “I don’t agree, Perkins,” said the economist: “I’m not at all alarmed by what you call this Catholic puritan pressure…” Another voice, an investment banker’s soft voice: “We buy from the States. We sell to England. Ground in the middle…” And the French Canadian lawyer’s voice: “That old conception of the power of the sterling bloc…”

  And McAlpine thought, What makes them sound so incredibly pompous and dull? He had determinedly reached a pitch of nervous expectation, but these voices did not belong to the expectation or the secret excitement of his soul; he felt let down, then on edge, then reckless as he had never felt reckless before. It’s only that drink, he thought.

  Catherine tugged at his arm. “Look, over there. Your friend Mr. Havelock,” she said, indicating a mild little man with a graceful air and a scrawny neck who was smiling to himself as Angela said to him, “Why is it, Ernest, that I never want to listen to symphonies these days? Only quartets.”

  But his father and mother had once stood outside this man’s gate. How could he now seem so unimpressive? he asked himself. As a gesture to his boyhood he wanted to speak to Havelock, but again someone touched him on the arm.

  “Ah, here you are, Jim,” said Mr. Carver. “Look, you know all about Henry McNab,” he whispered. “Over there by the refreshments. Come on.”

  The big-shouldered, white-haired cabinet minister was at the end of the diningroom table helping himself to celery sticks stuffed with cheese.

  “Very good celery, McAlister,” he said, after their introduction.

  “McAlpine, not McAlister, sir.”

  “Well, try the celery anyway.”

  “I was talking to Jim about your United Nations speech, Henry,” Mr. Carver said blandly.

  Playing along with him recklessly, McAlpine said, “I read it, McNab. Of course I know you have to do a certain amount of shadowboxing.” Mr. Carver’s startled expression jolted him, and he tried to concentrate on McNab’s blurring face. “I mean you did throw a little cold water on the hot heads of those idealists.” And then he lost track of what the cabinet minister said until he heard the words, “stupid self-deception.”

  “Stupid self-deception. Why, of course,” McAlpine repeated. The words offered him a disturbing illumination accompanied by a bewildering pang, and he was unaware of McNab’s and Carver’s blank expressions. Had he been frantically trying to achieve some stupid self-deception all evening? But he refused to deal with his own question. It was easier to ask, What if Peggy, too, had been deceiving herself, not only about her life but about her true feeling for me? Maybe only a few words were needed— And then Mr. Carver said, “You were saying, Jim?”

  “I was thinking I knew the kind of person Mr. McNab had in mind. I mean,” he faltered, “these idealists who deceive themselves. I was talking to one the other day.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, an intelligent young girl, a charming creature,” he said with a melancholy smile. “It was like talking to a brick wall. All idealism, no prudence – ready to hurt anybody who got in
her way. No, I don’t think she’d care,” he said. Again he faltered. “A passionate longing for the impossible, eh?” he asked.

  The feeling behind his words astonished both McNab and Carver. The liquor had loosened his tongue; he nodded dreamily, and in his thoughts went hurrying out of the Murdock house down to that bare room on Crescent Street and sat beside the iron bedstead and talked to Peggy. “A soft heart is all right if it goes with a hard head,” he said aloud to McNab in a gentler tone; then he blinked, cleared his throat, momentarily confused, realizing he had begun to make the speech he had wanted to make to Peggy the time she had cut him off. Behind him on the wall was a portrait of Judge Murdock’s father done in browns and blacks and burnt sienna tones, and against this sombre portrait, as he stood with folded arms, his own face looked pale and melancholy. My God, he thought, what am I saying? It’s that last damned drink of whisky. I’m supposed to be talking about international affairs and the United Nations. Recovering himself he went on, “I mean, sir, you for one see clearly that these idealistic people misunderstand the whole structure of the United Nations. A cynical structure really, sir, but you have tried to explain it for what it is, eh?”

  “I like – well, I like your sincerity, McAlister,” the cabinet minister said uneasily. “Let’s all be hardheaded.”